The claim

The background

Before getting to that, an explanation of "why this question now" is needed.

People on the left and right have been noting the disparity in wealth with increasing alarm.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has faced mass arrests, pepper spraying and increasing attention. It has spread to Boston, Chicago, LA, Japan -- and Las Vegas and Reno. One of its refrains pits the wealthy 1 percent of the nation against the 99 percent of the "rest of us," saying the Haves are dominating government and corporations to the detriment of the Have-Nots.

On the other side, Reno's Ty Cobb, once special assistant to Ronald Reagan, wrote this summer on his National Security Forum website:

"There is a rapidly growing income disparity in the United States that threatens the fabric of our society. The gap between those with the highest incomes and everyone else is widening, and it is reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression."

OK, so back to the question: What do you think is a fair amount of inequality, given that some people work harder, some are content with less, etc.? Seriously, imagine how much of the total wealth 20 percent of the people could have before things became unfairly unequal.

What if 20 percent had 30 percent of the wealth? 40 percent of it? 75 percent?

A study earlier this year asked people that question. It was published in Perspectives on Psychological Science and done by Harvard's Michael Norton and Duke's Dan Ariely, who spoke last month at the University of Nevada, Reno.

They found people across all spectrums -- rich and poor, Democrats and Republicans -- thought it would be OK if the richest one-fifth of the population had 36 percent of all wealth.

Now let's imagine five people shipwrecked on a deserted island. They are found years later.

Using the study's findings for what most people accept as fair, it would be the equivalent of one castaway having about a third of the island's riches, two having a fifth each, one having a seventh and one having a 10th. It's not as fair as each person having a fifth (20 percent), but those surveyed preferred it to greater disparity.

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Next, imagine instead you find that one person on the island has 84 percent of everything, one person has 10 percent, one person has 5 percent, and two people have together about a half of one percent of island's resources. Do you think that's fair?

That's what the United States has right now.

(The study showed people only numbers and asked them to pick between three options: complete equality, where everyone has 20 percent; the level of equality in Sweden -- which is approximated in the first "deserted-island" example -- or the level in the aU.S. People were split 51 to 49, with Sweden's version slightly preferred to total equality. About 92 percent chose Sweden's equality over that in the United States.)

Despite the fact that almost everybody thinks the wealth disparity in the U.S. is unfair when confronted with the raw numbers, a Pew Research Center report last week found that 52 percent of Americans do not believe the country is divided into Haves and Have-Nots; 45 percent do.

Another method of examining inequality is the Gini coefficient, named after Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini, who in 1912 figured out a way to mash together population and income data.

The Gini coefficient has become so accepted that the CIA uses it to rank countries around the world for wealth disparity. The United States is among the worst, right around the same inequality as Bulgaria and Uganda.

Remember how the Arab Spring started in Tunisia when a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and the masses erupted in protest at factors including high unemployment and poverty, toppling the government?

Tunisia has far less inequality than the United States, according to the CIA, as does Egypt and Yemen.

But is wealth disparity in the U.S. getting worse?

Emmanuel Saez has done probably the most comprehensive research on this topic. He's a French economist teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.

In a 2009 paper, he calculated the income of the top 10 percent of U.S. income earners from 1917 through 2007.

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In 1928, the top 10 percent of income earners made 49.3 percent of all income, including capital gains. This was not long before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression started. That was the highest percentage of income made by the top earners for decades -- until 2006.

It went still higher in 2007, as the recession hit.

That said, the Gini coefficient for the United States, according to the U.S. Census, has not changed from 2008 to 2010.

Using Gini to compare income inequality among states, Nevada dropped from 12th in 2009 to 21st in 2010 -- meaning the disparity got worse. Utah and Alaska had the least inequality, and New York and Connecticut the most.

If you compared Nevada's inequality to that of another country, the closest ones would be Cameroon and Iran.

The verdict

It's true there's a big gap between the rich and everybody else in the United States -- and it's bad, both based on what the vast majority of Americans consider fair and in comparison with other countries. The trend over the past 70 years shows it's getting worse, although it seems to be holding steady of late.

Here's one bright spot: The disparity may be great, but the poor in America are living well when compared with the rest of the world.

This next tidbit comes from "The Haves and the Have-Nots," a book by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic that Fact Checker learned about on the New York Times' Economix blog.

It finds that America's very poorest have almost 70 times more wealth than the poorest people in other countries. Not only that, but the poorest one-fifth of the population in the United States is still richer than the richest one-fifth in India.

This is perhaps why, despite great inequality, Americans in general haven't shown the desire to storm the barricades yet.